Databricks at Data + AI Summit

A Custom AI Trading Card Experience for the Databricks’ Community

Client: Databricks | Event: Data + AI Summit, San Francisco | Venue: Moscone Center

The Challenge

Data + AI Summit draws a technical, identity-driven audience: engineers, scientists, and data leaders who know exactly who they are and what they build. The brief was to create an on-floor experience that felt unmistakably Databricks, spoke to how this audience sees itself, and left every attendee with something worth keeping and sharing while maintaining a limited, streamlined set-up that let guests flow in and out seamlessly.

The challenges for Databricks are not uncommon. Big brands with large-scale conferences have many moving parts with differing vendors, floor plans, equipment, lighting, and graphic displays. With so many pieces to manage, teams often need custom solutions that don’t require as many resources to execute. They need tailored solutions that feel on-brand and relevant to their audience, while staying simple and easy to implement. It’s why AI Trading Cards have become such a popular brand activation for large-scale events and conferences. See our AI Trading Cards here.

Our Solution

We designed a custom AI Trading Card built end to end around the Databricks brand. Rather than a single output, we created six personas drawn from the roles this audience lives inside every day: Builder, Analyst, Strategist, Architect, Engineer, and Scientist. Each persona had its own developed AI filter, building upon each character to generate a unique scene and identity.

Guests were prompted by a singular question that guided them towards their persona. Then, they answered a few prompts such as their name, company, and special superpower. From there, our team generated a polished, fully on-brand trading card with custom AI styling and graphics designed for each persona. Guests shared their finished card digitally, on the spot.

The mechanics behind the activation are simple, but the customization is not. One of our biggest challenges was creating a personalized experience without too many steps, and building personas that felt cohesive under one brand identity.

The Results

Across three days, we crafted 320 individual cards, each one a completed, personalized portrait rather than your standard photo in front of a backdrop. The data underneath is the other layer. With lead capture and analytics built in, clients can use that information for post-event marketing or measure engagement and return on investment. This is where the experience becomes a campaign tool, not just a photo.

The intangible and often unseen result of these activation are the live guest reactions. The Databricks team and their guests responded to the visual polish of the output: graphics tuned to the brand and a distinct AI treatment for each of the six personas. Guests engaged with the brand, feeling like a central character within the Databricks world.

That is why this format has become a favorite of leading enterprise brands. It fuses personalization and brand into one object with real cultural weight: the trading card, a form people already associate with collecting, status, and nostalgia. The output is genuinely one of a kind, which is what makes it worth keeping.

Why It Matters

For a brand-forward team, this is what a designed experience can do that a giveaway cannot. It makes every guest the center of the story, reinforces the brand in a format people choose to keep, and turns a few minutes on the show floor into content that travels. Every layer is customizable, from persona design to graphics to AI styling, so the experience can be built to fit any brand’s world. Databricks is proof of how far that customization can go.